Former OpenZeppelin CTO Warns AI Has Made All DeFi Unsafe

Manuel Aráoz warned AI-powered coding agents are making DeFi increasingly vulnerable to exploits and difficult to secure.
Rising hack losses and faster AI-driven vulnerability discovery are intensifying concerns around smart contract security.
OpenZeppelin rejected Aráoz’s assessment, arguing AI-assisted monitoring remains the best defence against emerging threats.

Manuel Aráoz, OpenZeppelin’s co-founder and former chief technology officer, has warned that developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are undermining the security foundations of decentralised finance (DeFi), claiming that “all” of DeFi is now unsafe.

Aráoz said AI coding agents have become exceptionally effective at identifying weaknesses in publicly available smart contract code, creating what he described as a growing imbalance between attackers and defenders. He argued that developers must successfully patch every possible vulnerability, while AI-assisted attackers only need to locate a single flaw to compromise a protocol.

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DeFi Losses Continue to Mount

The comments come during a period of continued losses across DeFi platforms. According to DefiLlama figures, more than US$1.1 billion (AU$1.54 billion) has been lost to DeFi exploits over the past 365 days. April 2026 alone recorded more than US$600 million (AU$840 million) in protocol losses, including US$292 million (AU$408.8 million) from KelpDAO, US$285 million (AU$399 million) from Drift and US$197 million (AU$275.8 million) from Euler.

Anthropic has also warned that its restricted Claude Mythos AI model can independently discover software vulnerabilities and produce working exploits at a level surpassing existing automated systems. The development has raised concerns about whether DeFi’s security framework, originally built around human attackers operating at human speed, remains viable.

OpenZeppelin responded by stating that Aráoz’s views do not reflect the company’s current position.

We have secured DeFi for a decade, and that work now matters more than ever.

We are in it alongside the protocols, institutions, and developers building the next era of finance.

— OpenZeppelin (@OpenZeppelin) May 27, 2026